Standard Deviation in Spotfire Expressions and Visualizations – Part 1 of 2

Standard deviation is a statistical calculation that’s used to describe the spread of data around its average value. Standard deviation is simply the square root of the data’s variance, and the variance describes how close each data point is to the overall average. Standard deviation is useful in when analyzing the distribution a dataset, as shown in the screenshot below.

The topic for this blog post was submitted by a reader through the “What do you want to learn more about” box on the right side of this page (or possibly near the bottom if you’re viewing this on your phone). If you submitted the idea – thank you!!

When I started recording this video, I realized that it would end up being much longer than expected. like to keep the videos under about 8 minutes, so I decided to split this post into 2 parts. The video below covers #1 & 2 in the list below, and the next post (which I’ll publish on May 17, 2016) will cover #3.

To download the Excel file shown in the video, just [ninja-popup ID=1432] click here. [/ninja-popup]

In this 2-part blog post I cover 3 things:

What standard deviation is and how to calculate it

Why it’s important and what it’s used for

How to use standard deviation in TIBCO Spotfire with the following features and visualizations: